Why Talk When You Can Text?

Barack Obama used SMS to announce his VP nominee. (via adria.richards)

In the future, telepathic communication might begin to attract the money men but, for the time being, short message service, or SMS, is disrupting the way we communicate. The king of the crowd? GroupMe.

By now you may have heard, GroupMe, an SMS-based group chat service, was acquired by Skype for a rumored $45-86 million. A substantial amount by any measure, but more auspicious because the company was just over a year old. The SMS based application was created at a Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York because email chains just weren't efficient for communicating in real-time. 

Other major tech companies have taken notice to group messaging. Beluga, a similar service, was snapped up by Facebook before it could celebrate its first anniversary. Apple will be releasing iMessenger with the upcoming release of iOS 5 and Google has introduced Huddles as part of its Google+ platform.

The concept of group messaging is similar to chat rooms like those used in the early days of AOL. GroupMe provides a chat room with a private telephone number. To chat with other members, instead of addressing a message to them individually, you simply send your message to the room's number. To "reply-all" you do the same. The questions remain: why GroupMe and why now?

What makes SMS so great? It detaches the user from their computer and provides a channel of communication for person and utilitarian information. Still there are some unique factors that make this service really attractive.

• Penetration: a 2010 survey by the CTIA, the trade organization for wireless carriers, found not surprisingly that 99% of Americans are mobile subscribers. That's a large enough market alone, but when we also consider countries where low-end phones are more common than computers, SMS looks like an attractive means of distribution.

• Short codes: These 5-6 digit numbers are allocated by telcom providers to be associated with SMS-based services. Typically used by advertisers attempting to get TV viewers or radio listeners to text a message, these short codes allow for easy-to-remember "vanity numbers". Instead of remembering the short code number 74992, you simply text "pizza" to PIZZA.

• Programmable Services: With services like Twillio and Tropo, you can build an application to handle, process, and respond to SMS messages. You could use a SMS app to distribute valuable information like Obama did in his 2008 campaign.

• Frictionless Communication: According to a 2008 survey by Neilsen, people prefer texting to talking. Even Twitter knew the power of short, easy-to-send messages. That's why they initially released their service as an SMS app. The character restrictions of SMS, like Twitter, ensure succinct messages perfect for programmatic consumption and snark.

In the near future, these conversations could become a lot more valuable by adding third-party services. If you were in town for Ausitn City Limits, Austin's annual music festival, you could have used GroupMe to find friends at the festival and send alerts when a new act is about to perform.

Teenagers could use the same service to check their local movie theater for listings and coordinate a rendezvous time with their friends. You and a group of friends looking for a table for 5 at your favorite restaurant? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just text them?